From Stevensville, Maryland, Key was a two-time high school
all-American in lacrosse and an all-state selection in
soccer at St. Mary's of Annapolis. Hopkins women's lacrosse
head coach Janine Tucker watched Key play at St. Mary's,
and says one thing was immediately apparent: "She was a
pure finisher. The kid just knew how to score."

As a freshman in her first collegiate game Key scored five
goals against Davidson. She has gone on to score in every
game of her Hopkins career. In her freshman season, she led
the Jays with 52 goals and 22 assists. The next year, she
led the team again, with 55 goals and 32 assists, and was a
candidate for the Tewaaraton Trophy, awarded each year to
the nation's best male and female collegiate players. She
ended the 2006 regular season with 60 goals and 41 assists
and once more is on the list for the Tewaaraton. Says
Tucker, "In almost every game this year, opponents have not
been able to stop her. Nobody knows what to do with her.
She's just breaking records all over the place."

Tucker has a ready list of what makes Key a great player:
"Her competitive nature. Her work ethic. She's always
looking to improve. We've worked on making her a more
complete player, to become an exceptional feeder as well as
a finisher, and to play better defense. I think the best is
yet to come." — Dale Keiger

www.thinkport.org
Kids' educational programming has always been a staple of
public television — just think of Barney and Big
Bird. Now public TV is taking education online.

Thinkport.org, a collaboration between Maryland Public
Television and the Johns
Hopkins Center for Technology in Education, is an
interactive site that, according to its mission statement,
"aims to help teachers teach more effectively, inspire
students to learn, build bridges between schools and homes,
and fulfill Maryland Content Standards for education."

Thinkport hosts a "tech term encyclopedia," advice forums
for new teachers, and a calendar of community events like
library story hours, chess club meetings, and museum tours.
But Thinkport's "online field trips" seem especially geared
to get K-12 kids excited about learning.

One field trip, called Bayville, takes students through a
virtual community dilemma — Would a mega mall hurt
the Chesapeake Bay? — by teaching them how human
development affects the water cycle. Another, called
Knowing Poe, has street maps of Baltimore in Edgar Allan
Poe's day, as well as three drafts of one of his early
poems, "The Lake," to illustrate his perfectionism. Sense &
Dollars teaches smart money management, with an interactive
"Plan Your Own Dream Prom" that shows how to budget for
attire (make a dress or buy designer?), transport (limo or
parents' station wagon?), and extras (corsage? cufflinks?)
for that memorable night.

Thinkport.org is funded by a grant from the U.S. Department
of Education. — Virginia Hughes, A&S '06
(MA)

Operating room nurses are better team players than
surgeons, says a recent study led by Martin Makary, an
assistant professor of
surgery at the Hopkins School of Medicine. His team
studied the results of the Safety Attitudes Questionnaire,
which posed 65 questions about operating room safety.
Eighty-five percent of respondents said that certified
registered nurse anesthetists exhibited a high or very high
level of teamwork; for general surgical nurses, the figure
was 83.5 percent. Surgeons brought up the rear, with only
65 percent rated as team players. The study was published
in the April issues of Annals of Surgery and Journal of
the American College of Surgeons.

Gene offers clue to weight loss

Hopkins scientists have discovered a gene that protects
laboratory mice against gaining weight from a high-fat
diet. The gene, CPT1c, produces a protein in the
hypothalamus that seems to allow the body to respond to fat
levels in the bloodstream. When fed a high-fat diet of
mouse chow and lard — yum — mice that lacked
the gene ate less than normal mice, yet gained significant
amounts of weight. One of the study's authors, Michael
Wolfgang, a postdoc in
biological
chemistry at the School of Medicine, believes the new
research has found a genetic weight-management pathway that
will have implications for a genetic understanding of
obesity. The research appeared online May 1 in
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
— DK

In May, Johns
Hopkins Medicine International (JHI) signed an
affiliation agreement with Beacon Hospital, in Dublin,
Ireland. JHI will provide educational consulting services
related to performance improvement, patient safety, nursing
training and management, and ambulatory care. Scheduled to
open this fall, the 183-bed hospital is the first to be
built in Ireland in more than two decades. Says Steven J.
Thompson, senior vice president of Johns Hopkins Medicine
and JHI's CEO, "It is this type of collaboration that
allows Johns Hopkins to fulfill its mission to exchange
knowledge while contributing to the improvement of global
health care delivery."

... When India sends its first-ever spacecraft to
the moon in 2007-2008, on board will be a miniature
synthetic aperture imaging radar (Mini-SAR), jointly
developed by Hopkins'
Applied Physics Laboratory and the Naval Air Warfare
Center Weapons Division in China Lake, CA. NASA
administrator Michael Griffin, A&S '71, Engr '83 (MS),
formerly head of APL's Space Department, signed the
agreement with Indian Space Research Organisation's G.
Madhavan Nair last month in Bangalore. The Mini-SAR was
developed to map the shadowed areas of the lunar polar
region and search for ice deposits there.

... The Johns Hopkins
Bloomberg School of Public
Health announced in April that it will lead a five-year
initiative to strengthen the capacity of public health
schools in East Africa, beginning with the Makerere
University in Uganda and Muhimbili University College of
Health Sciences in Tanzania. The program, funded by a $2
million grant from USAID, aims to create a network of
trained public health professionals in the region.
According to Gilbert Burnham, a Hopkins professor of
international health
and the initiative's director, as the region receives more
global financial assistance, "there is a critical need for
trained personnel who can provide leadership and develop
innovative national policy." — Catherine Pierre

Scientists have assumed that estrogen, as a hormone,
required hours or even days to affect brain function.
Gregory Ball, Krieger School professor of
psychological and brain
sciences, has studied estradiol, a form of estrogen, in
the brains of quail, and found that it acts so fast, in
regulating male sexual desire and the level at which pain
is perceived, that it merits consideration as a
neurotransmitter. Ball and his Belgian collaborator,
Jacques Balthazart of the University of Liège, argue that
estrogen displays functional characteristics of a
neurotransmitter, such as being released at synapses and
rapidly influencing neighboring brain cells. Says Ball,
"How we categorize estradiol is of more than semantic
interest. It influences how scientists conduct research,
the kind of experiments we do, and even the way we design
clinical interventions that involve actions of estrogen in
the brain." Ball and Balthazart make their case in the May
issue of Trends in Neuroscience. —
DK

The ducklings were expected to make their appearance after
28 days' gestation, somewhere around press time. Their
mother did not say whether she and her family planned to
waddle over to Homewood Field for
Commencement. — Maria Blackburn

Stats: Diploma of Chemical Engineering '89, National
Technical University of Athens; PhD '95, Rice University

Research: Works to integrate engineering
fundamentals with concepts in biochemistry and molecular
cell biology to better understand pathological processes
— particularly cancer metastasis,
inflammation/infection, and thrombosis, "three of the most
important pathological processes affecting mankind."

Long-Term Goal: To provide insights that could
ultimately lead to the development of "novel therapeutic
strategies" to combat these disorders.

What He's Done Lately: Led the team that recently
submitted a patent for a new chemical isolated from
broccoli sprouts that appears to prevent inflammation and
chondrocytic cell death; a potential alternative to Vioxx
for treating arthritis.

On the Agenda: Shutting down cancer metastasis by
targeting and eliminating cancer cells circulating in the
vascular system. By identifying "earmarks" on tumor cells,
Konstantopoulos and colleagues can develop nanoparticles
loaded with chemotherapeutic agents that would selectively
adhere to the tumor cells, release locally, and kill
them.

Alternate Career: Economist or a political scientist
in a university. "I love academia — conveying
knowledge to other people. Teaching is very important to
me."

Course description: Offered during the summer
session, this class will explore the way in which the
patient emerges as a category of thought and analysis in
anthropology. Readings and discussion will be drawn from
ethnographic and theoretical texts, and films will
emphasize the relationship of the patient to illness
experience. Throughout the course, the question of how the
patient is defined and understood — socially,
culturally, politically, technologically — will guide
discussions and readings. The course also will consider
what it means to live with (and through) illness and how
life comes to be mediated by social and medical
intervention.

Readings:

Epileptic, David B. (2005).

Under the Medical Gaze: Facts and Fictions of Chronic
Pain, Susan Greenhalgh (2001).

Medicine, Rationality, and Experience, Byron J. Good
(1994).

"Pain and Resistance: The Delegitimation and Relegitimation
of Local Worlds," Arthur Kleinman, in Pain as Human
Experience: An Anthropological Perspective (1992).

"Reification and the Consciousness of the Patient," Michael
Taussig, in Social Science and Medicine (1980).